Autumn ATC

The theme for Florrie's Weekly ATC Challenge on Craft Swap forum is Autumn - Season of Fruitfulness. I made the background for this ATC using Adirondack Dye inks in Butterscotch, Terracotta, Ginger and Espresso. The Leafy twig with berries in the center is from a clear stamp set bought in Partners but I can't recall the manufacturer. It was stamped and heat embossed with copper EP and the leaves coloured with a Stampin' Up marker. The leafy spray at the edges a stamp from Clarity Stamp.

Two Projects - "Christmas" and "Something Funny"

The 25th of September marked the start of another month in the countdown to Christmas and time once again for Fab's Big Christmas Challenge. This month the nutter's challenge would be to make nine Christmas cards. I might even make that many but most of them will be quickie cards with using stuff like, dare I say it "peel-offs" I doubt if I will be adding them to my blog or to the challenge. Whew, OK I hope nobody noticed that shame-faced admission! Anyhow here is my entry for the September's challenge, but who knows, I might manage to make another 8 cards worth blogging about before the 25th of October comes around.

This one was stamped using a lovely Christmas Wreath stamp from Hearth and Home themeplate by Elusive Images. I stamped and embossed the wreath in gold, painted it with Twinkling H2Os, added a touch of red Stickles Glitter on the holly berries and some red Sakura Glaze pen over the bow to change the colour and texture of the bow when compared to the colour of the poinsettia leaves. With my wreath all coloured I decided it would be nict to cut it out. This was mounted onto a circle of gold mirror card with foam pads and then that was mounted onto my card. The card itself is a from some cream pearlised card I bought in the Paper Mill Shop and cut to a 5 inch square card. I covered this with a lovely paper from the Artylicious Season's Greetings CD leaving just a border of the cream card showing and then added some gold strip peel-off borders round the edges of the paper. More foam pads were used to mount the gold circle of card onto this for more dimension and as a finishing touch added a narrow bow of red organza ribbon to provide more contrast with the green design on the paper.

My other project was to make "Something Funny" for Florries Weekly ATC challenge on Craft Swap forum. I have a small set of mini clear stamps by Inkadinkadoo which are definately meant to be humourous so I thought this was the ideal project for giving these stamps and outing. The actual text on the stamps says "I gave up coffee, sex and chocolate" but as I had decided to make a chocolate bar for my background I only stamped the bit about chocolate.

The chocolate bar was made by inking a white ATC size piece of card with some brown ink from a Petal Point ink pad then I used the box making side of my score board to score grooves into the card to form a grid. I used the edge of the same ink pad to darken the brown colour in the grooves so as to create the appearance of more depth and a chunkier bar of chocolate. The stamps were just stamped onto some pink card with Adirondack dye in (Espresso), cut out and adhered to the chocolate bar background with foam pads.

Edit : Perhaps I ough to own up and say my comments about peel-offs were meant to be rather toungue in cheek. I do use them, mostly I use borders and/or corners, also sentiements. There are infact both a gold border peel-offs and a "Merry Christmas" sentiment on the Christmas Wreath card.

Florrie's weekly ATC Challenge - Mellow Yellow

This week the theme for Florrie's Weekly ATC Challenge over on Craft Swap Forum was Mellow Yellow. I had fun getting inky with some inks and sprays for this project. First I took a blank ATC which was white and coloured it all over with inks from a Kaleidacolor pad in shades of yellow. Then I stuck down some punched out flowers and a butterfly shape using repositional adhesive so as I would be able to remove them. I then spritzed my ATC with some Memories Mists and let it dry. Once dry I sponged a little dark ink around the edges of my punched out flowers then removed them and sponged some orange ink into the middle of each flower and onto the butterfly. I decided to give the butterfly a little more emphasis by adding an outline of glitter with a Sakura Stardust pen and also added some sparkle to it's body.

A little bit of Dazzle for Florrie's Challenge

This week the theme is "Sprinkle Some Sparkle" for Florrie's weekly ATC challenge on Craft Swap Forum. To make my ATC I decided I wanted to use some new stamps I bought recently - the Elusive Images "Big Flowers" Themeplate. I started by applying some ink with a sponge to a plain white ATC size piece of card with Yellow, Orange and Red inks from a Petal Point ink pad until I had a nice effect for my background. Once that was done I chose one of my "big flowers" and inked it up with more of the red ink and stamped round the edges to create a border. Also with the same red ink I stamped the word "Bloom" onto the ATC using a stamp from the Flora Bella themeplate which is also by Elusive Images.

Next I chose another flower from the Big Flowers themeplate and stamped it onto some white card again using the red ink, but this time embossing the image with clear embossing powder. I then cut out my flower and coloured it using Sakura Glaze pens, once again choosing yellow, orange and red. I applied the orange to the center of the flower and also in the inner parts of the petals. While the orange glaze was still wet I added the red glaze from the outer edges of the petals in towards the middle, letting the red and orange bleed together. With that done I sprinked on some clear holographic ultra fine glitter then left things to dry. Finally I coloured the stamen parts of the flower with the yellow glaze and again sprinked on glitter while the glaze was still wet. Again I left this to dry, then mounted my flower on some foam pads and stuck it onto the ATC.

Roses Are Red

A while ago I started making some ATCs with one stamp, the idea was to see how many ways I could find to colour the rose red. Here are the first 3 of the series, I have another 3 ideas for colouring my rose still to do and maybe more ideas will happen along the way!

The rose stamp is one I bought on ebay, part of a set I beleive originally sold by QVC UK. From the left, the first is stamped in Stazon and coloured with water colour pencils. In the middle I covered some gold foil card with clear UTEE, heated it, added a second layer and heated again, then sprinkled some red and green embossing powder in the area where I would stamp the rose and heated a 3rd time. Once that was done and with the embossing still melted I stamped my rose which I had previously inked up with Gold Encore Metallic ink. Third along is stamped on acetate with Stazon and then coloured with Sakura Glaze pens. The backing paper is something I came up with when messing about on Hubby's computer - he has Photoshop Elements and I thought it would be fun to learn some of what that programme can do. the rose stem is also from the same set of stamps as the main rose image and was embossed with red embossing powder.

Florrie's Weekly ATC Challenge - Week 110

The theme this week is "Anything Blue". I like blues, so it only took me moments to grab a Petal Point Fluid Chalk pad that has shades of blue in it and turn a white ATC blank into a pretty smudegy blue background. I worked the lightest of 3 shades of blue into the center and outwards then nearer the outside edges some of the mid-shade and finally at the very edges the deepest blue.

Once I had made my background I grabbed a new stamp I have been dying to use. It's a "secret stamp" ... well sort of. Last week at the Graphicus Workshop we saw these stamps being made, they are the Limited Edtion stamps which are offered to Graphicus Guild members. There is a different limited edition stamp each month and we saw the designs for the next four months! They are all lovely designs and I wanted them immediately if not sooner, but we were sworn to secrecy by Lynne and Bill - Bill is the gentleman who makes the stamps and had kindly let us interrupt his busy day and had answered our questions about stamp making. Anyhow later when Glenda Waterworth arrived she was told we had had a sneaky preview and when we all said how lovely the stamp were she said if we wanted to, those of us who were guild members could buy them now because we had come to the workshop!

To get back on topic now, the stamp I chose to use today is a lovely floral design with an oriental feel. I inked it up with Adirondack Denim ink and stamped it onto my prepared ATC. After stamping I decided to use a wet paint brush to pull some of the colour in from the outline into the flowers. Now this was interesting, because I got an effect I did not expect! The more I pulled the colour in from the edges towards the centre of each petal, the more a sort of mauve shade started to appear. It's very subtle but I think it can be seen in the picture. I rather like this, but it was a lucky accident and I am not sure why it happened - perhaps it was a reaction between the Adirondack inks and the Chalk inks I had used to to colour the background.